Hello Empowerment Community,
You may have noticed that we write a lot of posts about emotions and mental wellbeing for a physical therapy clinic and I thought that this might be a good time to address why. The reason for this is that mental, emotional, and physical health are soooooo very interconnected and there are more and more studies popping up that show that paying attention to them as an interconnected system, can have some tremendous results and that’s what we want for you!
If you want a quick explanation that goes deeper into this, I highly recommend this Gabor Mate talk on Authenticity and Genetic expression. https://youtu.be/pUGGNPAK6uw that has a wealth of information on this topic.
If not, I have a unique way of looking at this interconnected super system that may help you find some perspective on how to regard and tune them and get them into some harmony. It all starts with our specialty, the nervous system.
Your nervous system runs throughout your entire body and is always working to give you information about how your body is doing. I’m hungry, I’m cold, I’m sleepy. I like to think of it as a baby, because it only really cares about your most basic needs.
Like a baby though, it needs more than food, warmth, and sleep to be healthy. It also needs love, safety and stimulus to grow up kind, calm, and smart, right? So, do you! How does a baby communicate that it has a need for these things? It becomes uncomfortable and begins to cry. Do you know when you’re hungry, or uncomfortable? How about when you’re feeling lonely or unsafe? What do you do when you notice these things? I hope that the answer is you meet the need. You eat, or call a friend or do something calming to soothe yourself. If not, I sincerely hope that you can start to look at these sensations as simple communication from your body about what you need to feel okay and meet the need like you would for a baby. After all, what babies and nervous systems have in common is they don’t know any better, they just feel.
Next there’s the emotions. I like to think of them as the teenager that tries to speak for the baby. The voice of the nervous system. Now if you’ve known very many teenagers, you know that they’re often impulsive, passionate, and sometimes Crazy!
Just like our emotions. I used to think of emotions as the enemy. The ying to the yang of logic. I used to fight against them because I didn’t understand that they were just trying to help me learn things about myself like what my needs were or even what was important to me. That’s what they want to do for you too! I hope that if you can think of them as the teenager that’s trying to speak for the baby, it can bring more peace to your inner household.
That would leave us with logic and the adult, right? Now since we’re talking about an inner landscape, there shouldn’t necessarily be homework and bottles, so what might be the job of logic in this context? To help the other two learn, grow, and meet their needs in a way that won’t get us thrown out of society!
This is the advocate between our inner worlds and our outer worlds and the one who has to help the teenager communicate in a responsible way to the people around us. This helps us in the world and with relationships, another important aspect to nervous system health.
It may feel like an odd way to look at your health as an individual but to have harmony between these aspects of your system can bring your overall being a sense of peace and support.
If you can think of these systems in a way that you understand that they were all meant to work together and function as a whole, you might be amazed at the way that it can change the way you operate, internally and externally and what those changes can do for you.
As always, if you would like more information on the topics in these emails, please reach out to the office. We’ll be happy to help you reach your harmony and grow :)
